“…navigation through the Suez Canal is temporarily suspended…until the floatation works of the large Panamanian container vessel EVER GIVEN; that ran aground…are complete.”
Suez Canal Authority Official Statement
If there ever was a more obvious metaphor to reflect life in the spring of 2021, it’s the not-yet-over story of the container vessel EVER GIVEN.
The EVER GIVEN is a ship that is almost twice as long as the Suez Canal is wide. Like most vessels transiting this strategic and economically-important waterway, it was very heavily-laden with goods going from Asia to Europe. I don’t know what is inside the 20,000 containers, but I imagine that one of those items could someday wind up on my doorstep in the form of an Amazon box.
Irrespective of the massive cargo load, the “before” story of this ship isn’t unusual. Vessels just like this one (and smaller) pass through the Suez every day and night. Lots of merchant traffic depend on this skinny 120-mile access route.
In my line of work, the Suez is lovingly referred to as The Ditch. I personally have never transited the Canal—so I’m like everyone else just watching this story with great interest. As for my friends and shipmates who have made the journey, I’m told that it is an operation demanding precise execution and a healthy respect for the elements. You transit safely by leveraging the capabilities of your own ship that you know quite well…while at the same time making space on the bridge for an embarked pilot who has an intimate understanding of this area. I suppose a bit of luck plays into the navigation detail as well.
In the time since the news first broke about the EVER GIVEN getting stuck (when I first wondered if this was really true), I have zipped around Rome and its environs, performed various strings of fairly involved maneuvers that serve me well in doing my job, I’ve procuring and created many meals and have endeavored to organize future events in a waning pandemic-world. Periodically through each of these evolutions, I have opened up my smartphone for updates on the Suez. To see if the ship was free. As of right now, it is still being dug out of the canal. I don’t have personal experience with the Suez like I do with the Singapore Strait—but I know enough to understand that this one-ship blockade is going to have many second and third-order effects.
Whether it’s navigating an infuriating city like Rome or perhaps staying at home during a COVID lockdown and trying to do your job and run a household. Either way, it’s easy to perform mundane tasks and not reflect on how complex the entire experience of human living actually is. Technology and our task mastery through repetition make us more or less experts in playing our own game; we pretty much take it all for granted….
Until a figurative wrench gets thrown in somewhere. Suddenly, we’ve found ourselves off the tracks. Maybe stuck in a ditch. Or trying to safely feel our way out of a global pandemic.
The internet memes created about EVER GIVEN are of course clever and amusing. To me they serve as a perfect timestamp to frame what we’re all going through. I think that my favorite image is a close-up of the ship with a label “2021” on it. On the left is the comparatively tiny excavator that is valiantly trying to dig the ship’s bulbous bow out from the northern bank. Over the excavator someone has written, “Me doing the best I can do”. Someone else has created a Twitter account known as @SuezDiggerGuy. His profile description simply says: “Trying my best. No promises.”
I don’t need to give you a synopsis on How We’re All Doing here on March 25th, but I can tell you that I personally feel like humanity is the excavator, and we are trying to free ourselves from this mess we’ve been in for over a year. It’s sure not quick and easy to dig us out of this mess…and to think that all it took was some strong winds to blow that ship sideways and wreak havoc on the world’s economy….this is why I say the EVER GREEN is the metaphor of our current times.
The ship is too heavy (and long) to pull free—so the Suez Canal Authority have the painstaking task of trying to get this ship free so that the rest of the traffic waiting both in the Med and in the Red Sea can get on with their business. The internet is funny but the situation really isn’t. It’s a strong reminder at what we take for granted, and how quickly life can go sideways.
So like emerging from a pandemic, or to even think about resuming our pre-2020 activities without giving them a second though—all of this is still going to take some time. In the meantime, the stoppage will continue to come at a cost while the logjam persists. I’m going to keep returning to this news story—not only because it is salient to my profession—but also because I know it’s an important one just about all of us. Just like the pandemic brings us together—so do the funny memes—and so do the real consequences that come when the execution of our lives doesn’t quite go as planned.
I’m gonna continue to keep doing the best that I can, and in the meantime watch to see if the media will eventually identify the real Suez Digger Guy. Like so many others whose regular day jobs suddenly saw them on the frontlines of a crappy 2020 and 2021, he’s a real hero in my book.